details, details...

update & bump: President Hussein re-treads the worn out notions of Smoot and Hawley.

sowell and igst, very edited:

Hoover and FDR had no understanding of the U.S. economy after the stock market crash of 1929 and their interference in it deepened and prolonged the nation's misery...

Prior to this time, no president had attempted to have the federal government intervene to bring a depression to an end.

Many saw in the Great Depression the failure of free market capitalism as an economic system and a reason for seeking a radically different kind of economy — for some Communism, for some Fascism and for some the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration... remarkably little effort has been made by most of the intelligentsia to try to sort out the cause or causes...

While unemployment went up in the wake of the stock market crash, it never went as high as 10% for any month during the 12 months following that crash in October 1929. But the unemployment rate in the wake of subsequent government interventions in the economy never fell below 20% for any month over a period of 35 consecutive months...

In the wake of (the Smoot-Hawley) tariffs, unemployment rose far more dramatically than in the wake of the stock market crash. The unemployment rate stood at 6.3% in June 1930 — eight months after the stock market crash — when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed. A year later, the unemployment rate was 15% — and a year after that it was 25.8%.

All of this unemployment need not be attributed to the tariffs, but the point is that the tariffs were supposed to reduce unemployment. The unemployment rate was already trending generally downward for several months when the Smoot-Hawley bill was passed, a trend that reversed itself just five months after the new tariffs went into effect. Once the unemployment rate rose into double digits in November 1930, an unemployment rate as low as 6.3% was not seen again for the remainder of the decade...

(Obama & Co.'s) $1.6 trillion worth of interference (is bad enough, not to mention its) payoffs in aid of subversives...